


overnumerousness

by veggiesamosa



Category: The Boyz (Korea Band)
Genre: Cancer scare, Counting, First Meetings, Health Issues, M/M, Mentions of Cancer, Minor Angst, break-up, lapslock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-16
Updated: 2018-11-16
Packaged: 2019-08-23 18:29:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16624172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/veggiesamosa/pseuds/veggiesamosa
Summary: sangyeon notices it first. haknyeon struggles with measuring life when he's worrying about not having much left but there is only one second chance.





	overnumerousness

**Author's Note:**

> what do you call negative one sitting alone in an empty room?

haknyeon had known sangyeon for eight thousand seven hundred and sixty breaths (not that he has been counting since that breath that stuttered when the guy who held the bus for him smiled and let him know that the knot in his tie was coming loose. he even loosened the knot completely and tied haknyeon's tie and looped it over his head and pushed the knot snug against the top button of his shirt. it was enough of a struggle to breathe again when the tie was around his neck before the bus pulled up to his stop) when sangyeon pointed out something on the back of haknyeon’s neck.

it was offhand and it almost didn't mean as much as the fact that his words came after their seventy third kiss and before the seventy fourth. their third “good morning” had haknyeon worried about how he was supposed to relax on the thirtieth day after sangyeon actually asked him on a date.

four hundred and thirty two thousand heart beats later (or maybe several hundred more because sangyeon says very sweet words and then he does lots of other things that same evening which must certainly increase his heart rate) haknyeon is sitting in the waiting room of his gp surgery. he arrived early just because he didn't want to be late and it was lucky that he managed to get an emergency appointment early in the morning. the baby trying to launch itself from its mother's lap wails for twenty one minutes and the ammonia-soaked old man that takes the seat right beside haknyeon coughs eight times before haknyeon is called. the doctor hums five times while listening to haknyeon talk and then one phone call is made. the clock on the wall ticks one thousand six hundred and three times as haknyeon sits in the hospital waiting room for his referral appointment. he feels lucky that sangyeon had mentioned he would be busy all weekend and won't be able to meet him later and smell the cloying disinfectant that permeates his hair and his clothes from his time as an outpatient.

haknyeon bites three of his fingernails right down to the quick on his way home. they bleed and they're sore, he thinks. he can't be certain and the feeling is more of a memory that exists further away that the ends of his hands.

haknyeon fumbles his keys twice before he gets into his flat and he sits on his bed and opens and closes his contacts list eight times before he finally calls his mum. two more of his fingernails are bitten down until the harassed pink of his skin fails and scarlet shines over the hyponychium. the call lasts forty-one minutes and thirty-eight seconds and there are two hundred odd instances when haknyeon wonders whether the stuttered breath will end in a cry. haknyeon's lungs heave fourteen times between him asking what he should do now and the answer from his mother (firm. emphatic. the way she had always been, only it isn't the same as when he was a kid and he disliked how he seldom got his own way, and it isn't the same as how the words sounded almost like a threat when she demanded he call her every week when he said he was moving away. growing up he started to understand the importance of that tone in his mother and how oftentimes her voice was really as weak as her grip as she held him when she couldn't admit that she wanted haknyeon to call her every day.) “you'll live.” and haknyeon doesn't know how but he can't parse any other meaning behind it.

he knows he can't have another conversation like this so his mum says she'll tell his sister (only one because haknyeon doesn't want everyone to know unless he really is unfortunate) but he texts her anyway and asks her to come over.

she hugs him once (or maybe infinite times but it feels like only once because she doesn't let him go) and she says she loves haknyeon seven times but only once does it sound like things will be okay.

she cooks, because haknyeon's stomach has rumbled five times and he admits that he was too nervous to eat anything yesterday or this morning before his appointment. he has a blood test tomorrow so they somehow manage two meals within four hours and they sleep in the same bed, two sardines top and tailing like they did a score of birthdays before.

during the night haknyeon pretends not to notice that his sister is still awake too twenty seven times. he loses count of the snores he pretends are real but the long night ends when his sister scrambles three eggs each.

ten knocks on the door brings sangyeon, blinking three times more than normal and hesitating to even greet haknyeon in company.

“you're okay?” sangyeon asks. haknyeon isn't so sure but sangyeon shifts his weight between his feet three times and he is obviously worried enough that a confirmation is the only acceptable answer.

sangyeon likes right answers. it took three ‘how was your weekend’s for haknyeon to work out that the correct answer was usually the most honest one but it was their eighteenth “i saved you a seat” that made haknyeon realise that sangyeon worried too much about things and sometimes the right answer was whatever would settle his nerves.

sangyeon doesn't smile in that soft and familiar way that has triggered the flights of a trillion minute butterflies inside haknyeon for one hundred and twenty six days since haknyeon only offered half a thanks for being able to make it to work on time. this must not be the right answer either.

“i called you a lot. i left you messages too but you never replied.”

six missed calls and two voicemail messages. haknyeon almost finds it stranger that sangyeon hadn't text him and like this he can almost believe sangyeon claiming that it doesn't matter. haknyeon might leave the messages unheard until the end of time (or however many years or months it is before haknyeon gets a new phone with a new sim that won't remember the things his contact list has said to him. or however long it is until haknyeon no longer has ears to hear them).

sangyeon manages three polite exchanges with haknyeon’s sister that are uncannily similar to the accidental meetings they’ve had before. he asks haknyeon if he wants to go to work together.

“he’s not going to work today,” his sister says before she excuses herself apparently for her second shower of the day. there are only three rooms so haknyeon supposes this is slightly more privacy than if she had pretended to make a second breakfast.

“i wanted to know how you were and you didn’t contact me all weekend.”

haknyeon might not have messaged sangyeon but he had been visited by thoughts of him fifty-six times each of the sixty hours he was awake this weekend.

“i thought something had happened to you.”

sangyeon hugs haknyeon close. something has happened to haknyeon, he thinks. he isn’t sure. it hasn’t been confirmed for him yet. but sangyeon is relieved about whatever he had worried about and he sounds a lot happier by the time he leaves and makes haknyeon promise to call him later. haknyeon doesn’t think he can keep that promise when he couldn’t even call sick into work. his sister calls for him and acts as an intermediary between haknyeon and the dentist who speaks only in odd numbers of syllables and seems to think a joke is being played on him.

haknyeon feels like he is the victim of a joke. he knows he is only going for a blood test today because he was distressed enough yesterday that it seems like something is being done in the interim before any real investigation can be done. already twenty six hours and fifteen minutes have passed since the doctor printed off a form and added it to the handful of leaflets she passes over the table. she told him that he should hand the form in when he goes to the phlebotomist and in that time the card proved not to be stiff enough to protect itself from a myriad of creases and folds after all the flexing fidgeting of his hands gripping it in hopes it can keep him in this world.

he loosens his grip on the form and wonders if he can hold his breath for long enough to sweep the life right out of him when his sister asks how he found out about the bump on his back and how long he was been worrying alone over it for. haknyeon thinks that maybe he noticed it a while ago but assumed it to be a zit that appeared after a clogged follicle or two. but he hadn’t worried too much about whatever it was though sangyeon saying to looked different to the last time he saw it made haknyeon realise he should maybe have looked at it from the start. maybe that would have prevented this instance of finding a way to avoid mentioning that his boyfriend looks at his back sometimes.

haknyeon doesn’t forget to call sangyeon when he gets home and he doesn’t forget to avoid the five questions about how he is feeling. that week they talk every day (haknyeon reminds himself to call after talking to his mum, and sometimes his sister, and collecting the things he needs to remember to do like this is a good way of keeping track) and even if sangyeon says that makes him happy haknyeon knows it isn’t enough that he can’t count the expressions blending on sangyeon’s face as he hesitates to say the things that he really wants to say and maybe that is for the best. eight stars die in the sky while haknyeon lies awake at night wondering whether he can add something else to the burden that already makes sangyeon’s shoulders sag whenever they meet.

haknyeon watches the dentist extract nine teeth, he brings up the records of sixty-eight patents, offers stickers and sugar-free lollipops to eighteen children, makes three more children cry (though he’s not sure how), and assists with twenty six fillings. and then he breaks up with sangyeon.

haknyeon can see the expressions passing over sangyeon’s face as he works out how to word what he wants to say. he says, “i love you,” and that doesn’t sound like he heard what haknyeon had said. he tries again and their first “i love you” ends with sangyeon telling haknyeon that he wants to be there even when haknyeon is going through difficulties. especially when he is. two shuddering breaths and haknyeon is almost certain that sangyeon knows. he tells haknyeon he loves him a second time and there is one thing that he doesn’t say. that's alright. he goes home and haknyeon wishes that didn’t leave only one person inside his flat.

haknyeon thinks he watches another star die when he is still forty winks away from sleeping. he makes mistakes at work and the dentist pulls him aside when they break for lunch.

“are you still not feeling well?”

haknyeon still doesn’t feel well and the dentist looks closely at him like he will be able to see his health as easily as he looks into people’s mouths to see their issues there. haknyeon closes his mouth and the dentist looks away.

“your sister called again-” (that’s twice that she told him haknyeon was sick) “- every day since the first time she called she has told me that you’re ill. but you still come in anyway.” (that makes seven phone calls after the first. eight weekdays. four conversations both in person and over the phone where she has tried to make haknyeon laugh and zero where she has let him know that she was ever doing something like this.)

the dentist sends haknyeon home. (he loses three and a half hours of wages but there will be a time when that means nothing to him. he counts how many stars must die when he can’t see them because his side of the planet is staring into the blinding brightness of the sun for long enough that people like him don’t notice.)

his mum calls and haknyeon manages to breathe one hundred and ninety-two times before he breaks and he asks whether she’d be looking at the right time to watch him for the last time he can be anything. before he becomes nothing. he doesn’t want to be nothing. there is no amount of nothing.

“you're everything,” she tells him. she has reassured him like this three hundred and fifty-eight times before now. it might be too late.

sangyeon texts haknyeon three times but after reading them it is difficult to reply. maybe he loves sangyeon but he isn’t sure. he probably could very quickly, and quickly is all haknyeon can think about when he realised that reading pamphlets takes too long and he doesn’t think those are things he will be able to learn in the time that he isn’t sure he has.

there have been five “i love you”s in total but it is multiplied by the questions in haknyeon’s mind about whether he should even have the chance.

sangyeon has made haknyeon wonder about a lot of things. haknyeon used to count the number of red lights the bus stopped at between sangyeon waving him over to sit beside him and sangyeon starting a conversation. it was strange to sit there, bones rattling when the bus took a turn too tightly and bumped over the kerb, waiting (as one person alighted, five boarded, two alight, the bus didn’t stop, the bus didn’t stop, eight alighted, one boarded) until sangyeon asked haknyeon about himself.

sangyeon was a teacher at a secondary school. science, he told haknyeon as he smiled for the second time in that way that first gave papillons their second birth. he thought it was interesting that haknyeon was a dental nurse and he even told haknyeon that he had nice teeth so it made sense. sangyeon cycled at the weekends and his replies to how his weekends were usually involved some story about the roads he rode his bike along. just for fun he rode seventy-five kilometres away and even took pictures. he showed haknyeon the views the he captured on his phone and he ended up showing so many more pictures from his bike rides as the weeks went on. that was difficult to keep track of somehow but rather than weeks he started measuring their time in things without value numerical or semantic. how easy he was to spot each morning, how warm his smile felt, how funny his jokes were, how much it ached to sit beside him and want more than the twenty-three minutes (for ten days it became thirty-seven minutes due to roadworks) they were allowed in the morning.

it is the summer holidays and even these days haknyeon misses sangyeon. the hours he works are different and there isn’t anyone familiar to save haknyeon a seat in the mornings. there are plenty of familiar people but none of them ever reached for haknyeon’s hand on their fifty-third bus ride beside one another (fifty-fourth since they met and sangyeon fixed his tie, forty-eighth since conversation came easily, forty-seventh since sangyeon first complimented haknyeon’s appearance, thirty-ninth since sangyeon mentioned in that vague way that shouldn’t mean anything that he’d like to take haknyeon on a trip to one of the places he had cycled to, eleventh since sangyeon said he liked this part of his day the best) but even staying at home he misses the presence sangyeon usually has.

and just like sangyeon slipping his hand into haknyeon’s and kissing his knuckles and smiling over their hands, haknyeon remembers that he broke up with him. haknyeon wishes he hadn’t but he had to because things were getting difficult. it wouldn’t be fair to involve him in something like this. they have known each other for over one hundred _hello_ s but all the _good morning_ s and _i’ve been thinking about you_ s and even the _i love you_ s don’t mean that sangyeon should have to deal with haknyeon getting sick and making things complicated.

what must be the eighty-second time since thinking about him sangyeon calls. it is like he knew all along and haknyeon answers on the third ring.

“you want to talk to me?” he sounds surprised. haknyeon has only surprised sangyeon nine times before (once by being a dental nurse, once by bringing a pack of double chocolate muffins to share on the bus, once by being the one to invite him out to dinner just as friends, once by turning a story about his childhood into a joke, once by wearing an outfit that he had agonised over and not expected sangyeon to like so much, once by falling asleep when they had a picnic date, once by inviting sangyeon inside after their second date, once by spilling wine on him, once by burning a hole in the shirt he ironed after failing to wash out the red wine stain). haknyeon feels bad that this is something he has made sangyeon surprised about. he wants to surprise sangyeon with good things.

“i know you changed your mind about us but i still want to be friends like this.”

haknyeon still wants to be friends too. but that still might be a bit much for now. instead of thinking like that he says what he is trying not to think of. sangyeon's response makes up the other half of a sigh.

“whatever capacity you want me in your life, i am willing to be there. i don't want you to be scared and alone.”

haknyeon isn't alone. he has his mum and his sisters and apparently the dentist and also an old friend who recently got in contact though haknyeon isn't sure he wants to embark on rejuvenating their friendship at a time like this. he can count the connections that are pulling taut around him like it is nothing but it is so easy for those connections to become nothing just as easily as he could burn to nothingness.

sangyeon coughs once. he talks about how he is missing haknyeon and how he had seen somewhere that does bicycle tours and they could go together, or with some friends, or haknyeon could go without sangyeon and just give it a try with someone else. sangyeon likes options. they are all very nice options but haknyeon already has plans that day. sangyeon accepts it quickly and offers yet another promise to be there as soon as haknyeon needs him for whatever purpose.

the assurance is nice but haknyeon isn't sure he deserves that much. hearing that he does deserve it doesn't do much for him even when his mum is telling him to rely on his friends more at a time like this.

haknyeon doesn't want to rely too heavily on people before they are ready. he likes sangyeon (wants to love him, even) but it wouldn't be fair to resent him for being yet another person saying everything will be fine when there are no guarantees.

all ten of haknyeon's fingers are bitten raw and permanently pink against the sallow flush of his nail plate. his sister can swat his hands away from his mouth all she wants but there isn't anything quite like his teeth latching onto a sliver of skin and peeling it off so his fingertips sting in a way that gnawing at the harder surface of his nails never could. nineteen curls of corneum have fluttered away from haknyeon, already insignificant dust that is nothing without being sustained by his body. it is time for him to go inside.

haknyeon only has one lump on the back of his neck and the two thousand times he has thought to look at it he has given up because to him it is nothing more than a wart or a zit or an inflamed follicle and that's just fine. other times it has been barely noticeable pink, a little itchy if not also red. it is forgettable, even as a nebula with capillary thin bolts running right through it in billions of routes as it sits on his skin. it must have been there before sangyeon had ever flipped his collar up over it and fastened his tie sufficiently. finally, no matter what it looks like today (he didn't look, this isn't the time for emotional goodbyes so much as a good riddance) it will be gone. hopefully all traces of it will leave and not one of the thirty-seven trillion cells of his body will remember it for a reunion.

he is warned once of a sharp scratch. his eyelids close once and he exhales to a count of five. the needle piercing his flesh feels nothing like a sharp scratch and everything like a needle going into his arm. slowly he feels the push of the syringe and it looks like one steady push of dye but he feels one hundred pulses of it in his bloodstream.

the nurse tries to chat to haknyeon but this is very similar to his own job. he doesn't much feel like talking and he tells the nurse and watches the tension relax out of the frontalis and all the way down to the platysma and things are alright. the procedure is explained and his lymph nodes are marked. Haknyeon listens to the clock on the wall tick six hundred and eleven times.

haknyeon has a lot of time in the mri scanner and it is a shame he doesn't have anything to read. not that he would be able to focus on reading when he can't even focus on counting the days he has lived so far. he counts to infinity more times than he can be sure of and then he is removed from the capsule. he has a break and it's with his sister as she offers pictures of swimwear options for her holiday later that summer. there are three polka-dotted options and she curls her lip in disappointment each time he says he prefers a gingham, or floral, or block colored option. he ends up agreeing with her after the fifth back and forth over it. then the break is over and haknyeon is taken to his operation. he has never had an operation before so this is yet another first after the mri scan. he doesn't even make it to five when the anesthesiologist asks him to count (whether that was sheep or seconds or infinities or nothings.)

haknyeon realises he is at home long before he counts how many hours of his life he has lost. the unconscious ones feel like more of a loss because he can't remember them compared to the hours lost to breathing shallowly as though that would protect his lungs from the jagged sterile air of the hospital. on deeper inhales he can still smell whatever it is the hospital smell intended to hide (age, illness, death, whatever) only now he is safe at home surrounded by bedsheets washed in the same fabric conditioner his mum always used when he was growing up.

“you're awake,” sangyeon notes. haknyeon already knows that much. he quickly learns that his head is swimming and his neck is screaming for him to stop moving. he falls back against the pillows (seven, though he isn't sure where three of them materialised from) and counts the strokes of sangyeon’s fingers scratching the nape of his neck.

“your sister said you were in the hospital and i came to sit with you at home until you feel better. she just went out a while ago but she will be back. maybe with snacks for you too.”

haknyeon can't talk properly so he just cries. he doesn't know what time it is and he doesn't know how much longer he will feel the earth spinning on its axis as it comes closer to flinging him right off the edge (counting just nine times was enough to make him feel sick.)

“your sister says they're testing your lymph nodes and the… lump.”

haknyeon feels the hesitation which gives pause to even the six tears that helter-skelter over his cheeks and into the helix of his ears.

the lump. the bump. the growth. whatever it is. hopefully it is a spitz naevus though it is just as difficult to comprehend as the melanoma it looks so uncannily like. nothing at all like a birthmark and everything like a betrayal from his own body.

haknyeon wants to sleep fifty-six hours and discover the tumour he has been so terrified of all along was benign. he wants to recount the two hundred and eighty-seven memories of a life unlived and think it all silliness for no reason. he wants to berate himself for twelve tearful phone calls asking about death when there are cancers that aren't so easily ejected (hexagonal incisions to peel away the offending tumour with a two millimetre excess of innocent cells just to make sure) and ravage bodies who have known far more and less and sometimes the same as haknyeon.

he’s just silly. haknyeon is the silliest and all this fuss is for nothing. but even thinking that it is nothing doesn’t stop haknyeon from crying. haknyeon can feel all one thousand six hundred kilometres per hour of the entirety of existence spinning and there isn’t anything he can do to stop feeling sorry for himself. his neck and his shoulders and his back ache more than anything he has ever felt in his life and he just wants this all to be a dream that he can wake up from, indistinct as he feels now, and it would be possible to forget all about it with four blinks to wakefulness.

sangyeon dispels the five and a half thimbles of tears and he helps haknyeon take three sips of water. he tells haknyeon what it is like to try to repurpose lesson plans from his last school to fit the curriculum at the school he works at now. he holds haknyeon's hand and tells him to squeeze tightly enough that they both feel the same amount of pain but that's too vague and haknyeon wonders whether he and sangyeon really do feel things the same.

“you're incredibly brave,” sangyeon says. three words that haknyeon doesn’t think apply to him when he’s spluttering as he asks for tissues to wipe up the snot webbing across his philtrum. He doesn’t quite have coordination and it is somehow worse when sangyeon helps him with extra tissues.

haknyeon's sister hasn’t brought any snacks for him but he is struggling to drink water so he doesn’t mind it at all as she eats thirty three crisps and offers two crumbs to haknyeon. he can’t laugh but it makes her laugh five times that evening and sangyeon keeps holding his hand and rubs his shoulder reassuringly. haknyeon doesn’t feel particularly reassured but he almost wants to smile because sangyeon is halfway between being polite and wanting to make haknyeon happy.

this sort of happiness feels like it is so far from what he should be reaching.

“i was sad,” sangyeon says quietly when haknyeon’s sister went to use the toilet during a tv show haknyeon hasn’t been able to focus on between the fading anaesthetic and the painkillers he has been asking for more of. “but there isn’t much i can do about you dumping me. we were friends first and i just wish i had been a better friend to you from the start so you would consider relying on me.”

haknyeon doesn’t know how sangyeon could think he wasn’t a good friend. they met because sangyeon had held the bus for haknyeon and then sorted out his tie for his job interview. he had been a good friend before they were friends. he had told twelve dozen jokes and funny stories about his students and he had laughed at haknyeon’s complaints about patients until he had his own complaints about a bruised rib. he had pointed out five funny passengers in their first eleven rides and offered medication and sore throat lozenges when haknyeon mentioned a summer cold the sixteenth time since they met.

haknyeon hurts but the fifty-nine co-codamol tablets (three slip away wasted on the first two days so haknyeon is extra careful when his sister says he is allowed to take some when it has been at least four hours and he only has another twenty minutes before the ache barely feels in his neck is gone) he is allowed don't touch it even if his body tingles and one thousand six hundred kilometres per hour feels closer to three thousand two hundred kilometers per second.

fifty-six tablets swallowed (thirty were prescribed at fifteen milligrams and thirty more are bought at eight milligrams but haknyeon is never told what becomes of the last) and six changes of clothes he sweats through and one time he staggers into the shower and one time he cries and gives up because feeling this normal is too much to ask and two attempts at responding to messages from a friend he hadn't thought he'd ever know again and seven messages sent between them which make haknyeon's mum say she's proud on the third of seven phone calls and two new dressings applied to the hole where the tumour was and five new dressings on the holes where his lymph nodes were and three bowls of soup courtesy of sangyeon and one promise of a walk and three promises to come as soon as haknyeon calls in the space of one minute (though haknyeon is afraid to test how long that would really take so there are zero calls to sangyeon).

one smile and the assurance that all is clear. three hours where haknyeon can't stop crying. over five hundred nodes (still far above this number but vague enough not to count when a handful have been removed but haknyeon has never known what that means) and the longest month of haknyeon's life is over. it has lasted forever and he has a sort of forever ahead of him that even the dentist seems genuinely pleased to learn about.

there really is urgency in the world and two phone calls (collectively almost three hours between them) lead haknyeon to consider a third.

“i'm coming,” sangyeon says without letting haknyeon get half a word past hello.

soon is somewhere between eleven and twelve minutes and haknyeon hadn't thought seeing sangyeon would be so quick.

he breathes five times, asks if they will always be friends. sangyeon smiles and seeing this must be beyond an infinity for haknyeon and he has forever to see this smile and love it or hate it or so many things adjacent to those feelings. it is innumerable and forever is a second or it is all of the seconds until the end of eternity.

this haknyeon meets sangyeon for the first time when his eyes are dry and even if he wants to close them he can't block out this person who is breathing quickly (one breath in, one breath out, stutter out) after rushing to see him.

It has been seventeen breaths since this haknyeon met sangyeon (twenty seven since this sangyeon met this haknyeon) and haknyeon slides his arms around sangyeon and thinks that this one meeting can be the start of all the forever of all the trillions of stars in the universe.

**Author's Note:**

> what haknyeon has is a spitz naevus which occurs mostly in people under 35. it is a non-cancerous tumour and is usually removed but there are cases which cannot be defined so clearly and must be checked further to ensure it isn't a melanoma, or that it has spread to the lymphatic system.


End file.
